They pin her down, and one of them starts grunting, groaning as he starts rutting away.
“Come on now,” Lucas says. “I thought you enjoyed sharing her, thought you enjoyed watching your wife getting fucked by other men…”
Grace screams louder, her cries so high pitched that I think she might tear her vocal chords again. And then I realise the man has his teeth around her nipple, he’s biting right into her breast.
He jerks his head, then spits something at me and it flies through the bars, landing at my feet. I stare down, horrified as I realise it’s the piercing, her nipple piercing. He bit it out with his bare teeth.
I stare back at my wife, seeing the blood streaming from her breast. “You bastard…” I bellow, losing it, losing the last of my control.
Only, I am hauled back towards a metal door, up the clanging stairs. Her screams follow me, clawing at my back, shredding my soul.
As the door swings shut, cutting off the worst of the view but none of the sound, Lucas’s voice shouts after me, clear and cold over the cacophony.
“Kill Konstantine, Macrae. You do that, and all of this stops. You have until the end of the week. Think of the baby, Antonio, think of your child…”
The heavy door booms shut. The sound is muffled, but it’s still there. A distant, echoing agony.
I am shoved forward, stumbling into the vast emptiness of the warehouse. I fall to my knees on the cold concrete, my body convulsing. I don’t vomit, I don’t cry. I just kneel there, empty as the sound of my wife’s destruction echoes in the vast, hollow space inside my skull.
It doesn’t fade. It brands itself onto the deepest part of me. A soundtrack to my damnation.
Kill Konstantine.
The words are now the only thing left in my head, echoing alongside her screams.
The world outside the car window is a smear of grey and green, a watercolour painting left in the rain. Trees, fences, fields, they’re all just streaks of meaningless colour. The only thing in focus, the only thing with any sharp, terrifying clarity, is the grainy, black-and-white image trembling in my hand.
A sonogram.
How?
The word isn’t a question; it’s a scream trapped in the silent, air-conditioned tomb of the Bentley. It echoes off the walnut trim and the soft leather, a silent, furious roar that only I can hear. My knuckles are bone-white on the steering wheel, my other hand crushing the edge of the proof they gave me. Proof of my failure. Proof of their violation.
This is a trick. It has to be. A sophisticated, cruel piece of theatre designed to unhinge me completely. They took a picture from some other woman’s file, doctored it, printed it out. They’re monsters, but they’re thorough monsters. This is just another layer of psychological torture.
I force air into my lungs, a ragged, shuddering breath that does nothing to calm the earthquake inside me. I try to latch onto logic, to the cold, hard facts I’ve always governed my life by.
She was given a contraceptive. A mandatory, powerful dose before the auction. Conrad Blake himself oversaw it.
My eyes drop back to the sonogram as I trace the outline of the sac with a trembling finger. A life.Mylife. Mine and Grace’s. Conceived god only knows when.
No.
The denial is a fire in my veins. I won’t accept it. I can’t. Because if I accept it, the fear will consume me. It will hollow me out into a useless shell, and I cannot be useless. Not now. Not when she is still in their hands.
I need a fact. One solid, immutable fact to pull me back from this precipice.
With a snarl that tears from my throat, I fumble for my phone where it lies on the passenger seat. My movements are jerky, uncoordinated. I stab at the screen, pulling up the number I haven’t called in months.
It rings. Once. Twice.
“Antonio,” Conrad’s voice slithers through the speaker, smooth as oiled silk. He sounds amused. He was expecting this call. “To what do I owe the…”
I don’t let him finish. My voice is not my own. It’s a guttural, fractured thing, ripped from a place so deep and dark inside me I didn’t know it existed. “You gave Grace the contraceptive, right? That night she was auctioned…”
The line is silent for a beat. Then, he laughs.
It’s not a chuckle. It’s a cruel, delighted sound, the sound of a man watching a prized dog fight from the sidelines. It’s a laugh that says he’s been waiting for this moment, savouring the prospect of it.
